Web Hosting- Your Secret Power for Business Growth

28 January 2025, 13:14

When you’re thinking about a new website it’s natural to focus on what you and your online visitors will see at the end of the project. There’s nothing like unveiling all your new content and a fresh, functional design. But there’s another important decision to make before you can be sure that your website will be a valuable business asset.

Web hosting isn’t as fun or engaging as all the creative stuff. No-one ever wants to show off the server that stores their website. But it’s crucial.

Just like there’s good design and bad design, there’s good web hosting and bad web hosting. And just like design, bad hosting can cost you site visitors and online sales or other conversions.

So what makes for good hosting? Speed is incredibly important. Just like any other computer a web server can be old or new, well-maintained or out-of-date, and hooked to a fast or slow internet connection. When someone clicks a link to your site all of these things affect how quickly it appears.

This loading time matters. Google ranks slower websites lower, for example, because people don’t like waiting. Stats from Google show that when loading time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of people “bouncing” straight out of your site increases by 32%. In a similar way web stores see higher abandonment rates as page loading times increase.

That’s one big reason why we look for web hosts who run modern hardware, keep everything up to date, and have snappy networking. Since most of our clients and their customers are in New Zealand we prefer hosting that’s here, too. No-one wants to wait for data to travel across the Pacific every time they open a new page.

There’s more to think about, but if you’re lucky you can leave a lot of it to the geeks at your hosting provider. If they take care of server updates and patching, if they have a strong history of uptime (which is just another way of saying that they stay online), and if they are quick to answer questions and fix issues, then your website is in good hands.

All of this explains why we recommend MyHost. They’re a kiwi company with their own data centre in Auckland, and it’s home to some seriously speedy hardware. Their team is switched on and they care about our websites almost as much as we do. 

The launch of a new website design is an exciting milestone. Our goal is for your site to deliver value to you for years after it goes live. With the right web hosting all the hard work that goes into your site will pay off even more.